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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2025
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Okay, so Gabe Newell has.. too much money.
And the reason we see nothing of him anymore is that he's given up caring about games and is instead busy doing really standard rich person stuff, achieving bugger all.
At least he just fucked off and didn't ruin Steam on the way out. Gonna be a sad day if they ever go public
Implying steam was ever good
Yup steam is a fucking awful monopoly. I don't know why people think Newell is anything but standard subhuman billionaire trash.
Amerikkkans are always searching for the one good capitalist who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become just a smol bean billionaire. Even many who should know better subconsciously still believe in the Amerikkkan Dream.
Steam does have some benefits, however, that I don't blame people for enjoying. It's more convenient that 1000 CDs with 1000 different DRM schemes. It's convenient to have a central library for managing and launching everything, though that could have been accomplished in a vendor neutral way (but wasn't because there's no profit in that).
have you seen the competition? all those publisher apps suck shit. steam doesn't do most of the things that make a monopoly bad and having 50 different logins with 49 extra chances for your credit card to be stolen isn't better.
I mean it's definitely the best of worst but people make it sound like it's actually good. It's extremely bad for developers. Basically digital rent seeking, their favored nation clauses, more or less erasing physical media and the second hand market. This is just off the top of my head. But steam is awful
i don't know about where you live but there was basically no second-hand market for win 9x games anyway.
In small towns yeah you'll never get a second hand market. But everywhere else you can. I mean even now there is a big market for second hand switch games. You can basically play any game for like $20 if you buy used (or even new) and sell when you're done.
sorry what does that have to do with pc games?
Steam is one of those publisher apps. It's just the least shit one because it launched significantly earlier and people were forced to use it.
When it launched, and for solidly the first decade of it's existence, it was widely considered to be resource hogging and intrusive DRM.
you don't have to tell me, i held out on making an account until 2015
Steam is good for gamers. For developers, not so much, but I love being able to press a button, download on any computer a game I bought, and have my saved games on cloud storage. Epic Games, arguably their biggest competitor, has been giving out weekly free games for years because Steam is so good that people don't leave it even with games for free. Built-in mod support, good download speeds, excellent compatibility with gamepads using the Big Picture mode... It's a really good platform to play with.
Sure, it's still a capitalist business and all of that should be nationalized and made public, especially before it inevitably turns to dogshit, but it is a good platform to play on, as of now.
It does basically everything I want from a game distribution service. For singleplayer games it's fine to grab an exe off of GOG/itch/some torrent, but getting friends to do multiplayer is a lot easier on Steam than going back to the Hamachi days, lol
Oh my god, Hamachi. That word just unlocked a part of my brain that hasn't been activated since 2012, woah.
Hamachi was great. We used to keep a network up with DC++ servers on it for sharing media.
better than digging through CD wallets and finding the special DRM wheel
Well... It is.
I'm not gaben fanboy, I'm a pirate. Even so, steam cloud saves and library sharing provides enough value to me that I'll actually purchase games.
Do I usually also download the pirate version of games I own to play? Damn right, but if I want to share the games I like best with my less technical friends n fam? I get the steam versions.
I prefer the simple hedonism over nefarious philanthropy shit or investing into other industries.
I'm more concerned with the extremely needless and harmful waste of $500 million dollars worth of goods, rather than what the rich person says its for.
Hundreds of lifetimes of work down the drain for this shit.